http://www.latimes.com/la-op-arkin24nov24001455,0,4926254.storyLos
Angeles Times
November 24, 2002
DEFENSE STRATEGY
The
Military's New War of Words
By William M. Arkin - E-mail:
warkin@igc.orgSOUTH POMFRET, Vt. -- It
was California's own Hiram Johnson who said, in
a speech on the Senate floor
in 1917, that "the first casualty, when war
comes, is truth."
What
would he make of the Bush administration?
In a policy shift that reaches
across all the armed services, Secretary
of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and
his senior aides are revising missions
and creating new agencies to make
"information warfare" a central
element of any U.S. war. Some hope it will
eventually rank with bombs
and artillery shells as an instrument of
destruction.
What is disturbing about Rumsfeld's vision of information
warfare is
that it has a way of folding together two kinds of wartime
activity
involving communications that have traditionally been separated by
a
firewall of principle.
The first is purely military. It includes
attacks on the radar,
communications and other "information systems" an enemy
depends on to
guide its war-making capabilities. This category also
includes
traditional psychological warfare, such as dropping leaflets
or
broadcasting propaganda to enemy troops.
The second is not directly
military. It is the dissemination of public
information that the American
people need in order to understand what is
happening in a war, and to decide
what they think about it. This
information is supposed to be
true.
Increasingly, the administration's new policy -- along with the
steps
senior commanders are taking to implement it -- blurs or even erases
the
boundaries between factual information and news, on the one hand,
and
public relations, propaganda and psychological warfare, on the
other.
And, while the policy ostensibly targets foreign enemies, its
most
likely victim will be the American electorate.
One of Rumsfeld's
first steps into this minefield occurred last year
with the creation of the
Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence. Part
of its stated mission was to
generate disinformation and propaganda that
would help the United States
counter Islamic extremists and pursue the
war on terrorism.
The
office's nominal target was the foreign media, especially in the
Middle East
and Asia. As critics soon pointed out, however, there was no
way -- in an age
of instant global communications -- that Washington
could propagandize abroad
without that same propaganda spreading to the
home front.
Faced with a
public outcry, Rumsfeld declared it had all been a big
misunderstanding. The
Pentagon would never lie to Americans. The Office
of Strategic Influence was
shut down. But the impulse to control public
information and bend it to the
service of government objectives did not
go away.
This fall, Rumsfeld
created a new position of deputy undersecretary for
"special plans," a
euphemism for deception operations. The special plans
policy czar will sit
atop a huge new infrastructure being created in the
name of information
warfare.
On Oct. 1, in a little-noticed but major reorganization, U.S.
Strategic
Command took over all responsibilities for global information
attacks.
The Omaha-based successor to the Strategic Air Command has
solely
focused up to now on nuclear weapons.
Similarly, the country's
most venerable and historic bombing command,
the 8th Air Force, which carried
the air war to Germany in World War II,
has been directed to transfer its
bomber and fighter aircraft to other
commands so that it can focus
exclusively on worldwide information
attacks.
The Navy, meanwhile, has
consolidated its efforts in a newly formed
Naval Network Warfare Command. And
the Joint Strategic Capabilities
Plan, or JSCP, prepared by the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, now declares
information to be just as important in war as
diplomatic, military or
economic factors.
The strategic capabilities
plan is the central war-fighting directive
for the U.S. military. It
establishes what are called "Informational
Flexible Deterrent Options" for
global wars, such as the war on
terrorism, and separate plans written for
individual theaters of war,
such as Iraq.
To a large extent, these
documents and the organizational shifts behind
them are focused on such
missions as jamming or deceiving enemy radar
systems and disrupting command
and control networks. Such activities
only carry forward efforts that have
been part of U.S. military tactics
for decades or longer.
But a
summary of the strategic capabilities plan and a raft of other
Pentagon and
armed forces documents made available to The Times make it
clear that the new
approach now includes other elements as well: the
management of public
information, efforts to control news media sources
and manipulation of public
opinion.
The plan summary, for instance, talks of "strategic" deception
and
"influence operations" as basic tools in future wars. According
to
another Defense Department directive on information warfare
policy,
military leaders should use information "operations" to "heighten
public
awareness; promote national and coalition policies, aims, and
objectives
... [and] counter adversary propaganda and disinformation in the
news."
Both the Air Force and the Navy now list deception as one of
five
missions for information warfare, along with electronic
attack,
electronic protection, psychological . attacks and public affairs.
A
September draft of a new Air Force policy describes
information
warfare's goals as "destruction, degradation, denial,
disruption,
deceit, and exploitation." These goals are referred to
collectively as
"D5E."
In order to do a better job of deception, the
joint chiefs have issued a
"Joint Policy for Military Deception" that directs
the individual
services to work on the task in peacetime as well as
wartime.
Specifically, it orders the Air Force to develop better doctrine
and
techniques for incorporating deception into war plans.
The Air
Force, in response, now defines military deception as action
that "misleads
adversaries, causing them to act in accordance with" U.S.
objectives. And,
like the other services, it is increasingly folding its
"public affairs"
apparatus -- that is, the open world of media relations
-- into the
information warfare team.
"Gaining and maintaining the information
initiative in a conflict can be
a powerful weapon to defeat propaganda," the
Air Force said in its
January doctrine.
That echoes a statement by
Navy Rear Adm. John Cryer III, who worked on
information warfare in the
Combined Air Operations Center in Saudi
Arabia during the Afghanistan war:
"It was our belief ... we were losing
the information war early when we
watched Al Jazeera," Cryer said at an
October conference, meaning that the
U.S. perspective was inadequately
represented on the Arab world's equivalent
of CNN. "We came around, but
it took a lot longer than it should
have."
Of course there is nothing wrong with making sure the U.S. point
of view
gets represented in the news media, both abroad and at home.
Done
properly, that is a prescription for more openness and less
unnecessary
secrecy.
The problem is that Rumsfeld's vision of
information warfare seems to
push beyond the notion that American ideas and
information should
compete with the enemy's on a level playing field. And
Rumsfeld's
vision, with its melding of public information and deception, is
taking
root in the armed services.
The new Air Force doctrine, for
example, declares that the news media
can be used not only to convey "the
leadership's concern with [an]
issue," but also to avoid "the media going to
other sources [such as an
adversary or critic of U.S. policy] for
information." In other words,
information warfare now includes controlling as
much as possible what
the American public sees and reads.
The
disinformation campaign being constructed goes against even the
military's
own stated mission. Truthfulness, the Air Force says, is a
key to defeating
adversaries. Accordingly, the service branch adds,
"U.S. and friendly forces
must strive to become the favored source of
information."
The
potential for mischief is magnified by the fact that so much of what
the U.S.
military does these days falls into the category of covert
operations.
Americans are now operating out of secret bases in places
like Uzbekistan and
the Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq; Special Forces
units are said to be
inside western Iraq as well. In the meantime, the
armed forces are making use
of facilities in the Arab states along the
Persian Gulf.
In all these
cases and more, the U.S. and other western news media
depend on the military
for information. Since reporters cannot travel
into parts of Iraq and other
places in the region without military
escort, what they report is generally
what they've been told.
And when the information that military officers
provide to the public is
part of a process that generates propaganda and
places a high value on
deceit, deception and denial, then truth is indeed
likely to be high on
the casualty list.
That is bad news for the
American public. In the end, it may be even
worse news for the Bush
administration -- and for a U.S. military that
has spent more than 25 years
climbing out of the credibility trap called
Vietnam.